This May Day

In a little over a month, hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of
people will fill the streets in city after city, town after town, across the
US. This year these May Day marches of immigrant workers will make an important
demand on the Obama administration: End the draconian enforcement policies of
the Bush administration. Establish a new immigration policy based on human rights
and recognition of the crucial economic and social contributions of immigrants
to US society.

This year's marches will continue the recovery in the US of the celebration
of May Day, recognized in the rest of the world as the day recognizing the contributions
and achievements of working people. That recovery started on Monday, May 1,
2006, when over a million people filled the streets of Los Angeles, with hundreds
of thousands more in Chicago, New York and cities and towns throughout the United
States. Again on May Day in 2007 and 2008, immigrants and their supporters demonstrated
and marched, from coast to coast.

One sign found in almost every march said it all: "We are Workers, not
Criminals!" Often it was held in the calloused hands of men and women who
looked as though they'd just come from work in a factory, cleaning an office
building or picking grapes. The sign stated an obvious truth. Millions of people
have come to the United States to work, not to break its laws. Some have come
with visas, and others without them. But they are all contributors to the society
they've found here.

The protests have seemed spontaneous, but they come as a result of years of
organizing, educating and agitating - activities that have given immigrants
confidence, and at least some organizations the credibility needed to mobilize
direct mass action. This movement is the legacy of Bert Corona, immigrant rights
pioneer and founder of many national Latino organizations. He trained thousands
of immigrant activists, taught the value of political independence, and believed
that immigrants themselves must conduct the fight for immigrant rights. Most
of the leaders of the radical wing of today's immigrant rights movement were
students or disciples of Corona.

Immigrants, however, feel their backs are against the wall, and they came out
of their homes and workplaces to show it. In part, their protests respond to
a wave of draconian proposals to criminalize immigration status, and work itself
for undocumented people. But the protests do more than react to a particular
congressional or legislative agenda. They are the cumulative response to years
of bashing and denigrating immigrants generally, and Mexicans and Latinos in
particular.

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act made it a crime, for the first
time in US history, to hire people without papers. Defenders argued that if
people could not legally work they would leave. Life was not so simple.

Undocumented people are part of the communities they live in. They cannot simply
go, nor should they. They seek the same goals of equality and opportunity that
working people in the US have historically fought to achieve. In addition, for
most immigrants, there are no jobs to return to in the countries from which
they've come. Rufino Dominguez, a Oaxacan community leader in Fresno, California,
says, "The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) made the price of
corn so low that it's not economically possible to plant a crop anymore. We
come to the US to work because there's no alternative." After Congress
passed NAFTA, six million displaced people came to the US as a result.

Instead of recognizing this reality, the US government has attempted to make
holding a job a criminal act. Some states and local communities, seeing a green
light from the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that go
even further. Last summer, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed
a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn't correct a mismatch
between the Social Security number the worker had provided an employer and the
SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration
visa, and therefore no valid Social Security number.

With 12 million people living in the US without legal immigration status, the
regulation would lead to massive firings, bringing many industries and businesses
to a halt. Citizens and legal visa holders would be swept up as well, since
the Social Security database is often inaccurate. Under Chertoff, the Bureau
of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted sweeping workplace raids,
arresting and deporting thousands of workers. Many have been charged with an
additional crime - identity theft - because they used a Social Security number
belonging to someone else to get a job. Yet, workers using another number actually
deposit money into Social Security funds, and will never collect benefits their
contributions paid for.

The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the
immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify,
which is even more incomplete and full of errors than Social Security. They
must fire workers whose names get flagged. And Mississippi passed a bill making
it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10
years, fines of up to $10,000, and no bail for anyone arrested. Employers get
immunity.

Many of these punitive measures were incorporated into proposals for "comprehensive
immigration reform" that were debated in Congress in 2006 and 2007. The
comprehensive bills combined increased enforcement, especially criminalization
of work for the undocumented, with huge guest worker programs under which large
employers would recruit temporary labor under contract outside the US, bringing
workers into the country in a status that would deny them basic rights and social
equality. While those proposals failed in Congress, the Bush administration
implemented some of their most draconian provisions by executive order and administrative
action.

Together, these factors have produced a huge popular response, which has become
most visible in the annual marches and demonstrations on May Day. Nativo Lopez,
president of both the Mexican American Political Association and the Hermandad
Mexicana Latinoamericana, says "the huge number of immigrants and their
supporters in the streets found these compromises completely unacceptable. We
will only get what we're ready to fight for, but people are ready and willing
to fight for the whole enchilada. Washington legislators and lobbyists fear
the growth of a new civil rights movement in the streets, because it rejects
their compromises and makes demands that go beyond what they have defined as
'politically possible.'"

The marches have put forward an alternative set of demands, which include a
real legal status for the 12 million undocumented people in the US, the right
to organize to raise wages and gain workplace rights, increased availability
of visas that give immigrants some degree of social equality, especially visas
based on family reunification, no expansion of guest worker programs, and a
guarantee of human rights to immigrants, especially in communities along the
US/Mexican border.

At the same time, the price of trying to push people out of the US who've come
here for survival is that the vulnerability of undocumented workers will increase.
Unscrupulous employers use that vulnerability to deny overtime pay or minimum
wage, or fire workers when they protest or organize. Increased vulnerability
ultimately results in cheaper labor and fewer rights for everyone. After deporting
over 1,000 workers at Swift meatpacking plants, Homeland Security Secretary
Chertoff called for linking "effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker
program.'' The government's goal is cheap labor for large employers. Deportations,
firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and contribute to a
climate of fear and insecurity for all workers.

The May 1 actions highlight the economic importance of immigrant labor. Undocumented
workers deserve legal status because of that labor - their inherent contribution
to society. The value they create is never called illegal, and no one dreams
of taking it away from the employers who profit from it. Yet the people who
produce that value are called exactly that - illegal. All workers create value
through their labor, but immigrant workers are especially profitable, because
they are so often denied many of the union-won benefits accorded to native-born
workers. The average undocumented worker has been in the US for five years.
By that time, these workers have paid a high price for their lack of legal status,
through low wages and lost benefits.

On May 1, the absence of immigrant workers from workplaces, schools and stores
demonstrates their power in the national immigration debate and sends a powerful
message that they will not be shut out of the debate over their status. They
have rescued from anonymity the struggle for the eight-hour day, begun in Chicago
over a century ago by the immigrants of yesteryear. They overcame the legacy
of the cold war, in which celebrations of May Day were attacked and banned.
They are recovering the traditions of all working people for the people of the
United States.